The All-Important Question: “Why Do I Have To Take This Class?”
Ms. Culver’s students working on their “Victory Garden” projects.
In February of 2020 I was teaching about pandemics with a study of the Spanish Flu, followed shortly by a unit on how the people of WWII had to ration, deal with shortages, budget for hard times, and plant victory gardens. Within a few short weeks, my students would experience all of these topics that I was covering in class, except in a 2020 version: a pandemic, a shortage of goods ranging from toilet paper to cleaning products, at-home planting and canning, and budgeting for the unexpected.
The classroom material was not just a lesson to be studied and memorized for a test; instead, the classroom material directly related to our lives as we became living history. Throughout 2020, I continually heard people say, “This year is unprecedented;” whether on the TV, social media, the newspaper, or in everyday conversations, that refrain continually popped up: “This is just so unprecedented.” And I continually thought, “No, it’s not. It’s not unprecedented at all; read a history book. We have been through pandemics, and economic upheaval, and that’s why we study history.” It was my job to show students that no, we weren’t alone, as people of the past had stood on this ground years ago, and we could use that connection to history to learn and grow. My students, while virtually learning, suddenly had a first-hand experience with everything we had been learning. We modified and adjusted (as everyone did in the spring of 2020), connecting our WWII victory garden unit to current events, writing thank you letters to our community’s essential workers and sending the workers “Seeds of Hope” (seeds they could plant at home) as a thank you to those who kept our economy running. That connection between the past and the present was what kept students interested as we closed out a very different school year.
Find those Real World connections and you won’t have to explain why students need your class. . . they will just know.
Another student works on planting for the classroom “Victory Garden.”
While teaching right now has brought its challenges, we need to keep providing students that connection to the material, or they will not understand why they have to take a certain class. That all-important question of “Why do I have to take this class?” should consistently be answered for students within our lessons. Plant the figurative (or literal, in the case of our victory garden unit) seeds within your students to make an emotional, personal, deep connection to the material. I remember teaching my students about George Washington, and they were rather uninterested. I stopped what I was doing an pulled up a giant picture of George Washington’s dentures (from Mount Vernon’s fabulous website, which I highly recommend, found at https://www.mountvernon.org/) and suddenly my students were animated, excited, and interested in George Washington. All because I bridged over 200-years of history with a picture of some teeth. Instead of talking about the importance of voting we held a voter registration drive for our high school seniors (contact your county courthouse to do this at your own district; for interactive games about voting check out iCivics at https://www.icivics.org/); when talking about Congress we Skyped with our members of Congress from Washington, DC (reach out to your member of Congress; they will likely Skype with your students as well; you can find your representative at https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative); we practiced yoga in the classroom to connect to mindful economic habits (check out Economics Arkansas for creative and inventive ways to fit economics into any curriculum, at https://www.economicsarkansas.org/); and we had “virtual pen pals” in both New Jersey and Germany this fall semester, connecting with students from around the nation and world as we compared our experiences during an election pandemic year. Find those connections, and you won’t have to explain why students need your class. . . they will just know.
Good luck, and remember that YOU GOT THIS!
